


soul circles

by copperiisulfate



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fluff and Crack, M/M, POV Second Person, Polyamory, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 05:28:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3884134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperiisulfate/pseuds/copperiisulfate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tatara tells you one day, without you needing to ask. He says it with his chin on his palm and his elbow on the counter, eyes on the drink you poured out for him. “I don’t, by the way, believe in it.”</p><p>You throw him a slant of a smile. “Really then? I always took you for a romantic too.”</p><p>“Not soulmates. More like circles.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	soul circles

 

Tatara asks you once if you believe in soulmates and you shrug and say, “Who even knows.”

Later though, you think, _No, not really_. It’s too nice and neat, too disciplined a concept, too specific. And then, there’s a part of you, which isn’t tired to the bone, which does genuinely believe—or wants to at any rate, that anyone can love anyone, even if you feel like you may have met your own quota for that.

What made one person so special anyway, elevated them above the rest? Was it time that was the quantifier? Or just something special about them? Something shared or something unique? Something no one else had?

You think about how you’ve known Tatara for a number of years now and Mikoto for years and years and years. You’ve been with a number of women and men and the running joke had always been that, at the end of the day, for all intents and purposes, you were practically married to these two. People left you over this, because they couldn’t deal with it, the way you couldn’t bother to prioritize much else above them. You used to not understand but you don’t think you care so much anymore.

Mikoto had laughed when he’d first found this out, or laughed in that under-his-breath chuckle sort of way. “Their loss,” he’d said, and you’d thought he was mocking you but he sounded alarmingly serious.

“Our gain,” Tatara had said, laughing, when he’d found out. Two sides to the same equation, you supposed. This was, of course, much later, after Tatara had gone through his own sorting out, his own questioning phase. You sometimes want to ask him if he found an answer of his own.

Then there’s Mikoto, with his own circle of gravity, Mikoto, who will probably either never fall in love or be so long gone but barely even register it.

 _Except_ \--even when you’re usually right about him, sometimes you are so very wrong. 

He knows. Of course, he knows. He looks at you sometimes when he thinks you can’t see him and you catch his gaze burning holes in the back of Tatara’s head. You want to laugh because you don’t know how you’d underestimated this. 

(Although sometimes, you also want to cry because there’s something inherently tragic about it, him feeling this way, and maybe you need to shake it out of yourself, this thing where everyone sees this great wonder when they look at him, and it’s not that they’re wrong, but you just can’t get past the afterimage of the boy, sixteen, sullen and disastrous, burned into your mind.) 

He’s an adult, you tell yourself. He can manage it. 

(He really can’t.)

 

*

 

Tatara tells you one day, without you needing to ask. He says it with his chin on his palm and his elbow on the counter, eyes on the drink you poured out for him. “I don’t, by the way, believe in it.”

You throw him a slant of a smile. “Really then? I always took you for a romantic too.”

“Not soulmates. More like circles.”

“Hm?” You don’t know if you follow.

“I don’t like the rule that there can only be one.”

“Totsuka Tatara the playboy,” you grin at him, “our secret Casanova.”

He laughs then, says, “Not that.”

You level him with a look then, suddenly serious. “I always thought you only had eyes for the one.”

He has the decency to look a little flustered then. “Not _just_ one. It’s just--different,” he swallows and then meets your eyes and there’s something there, something different. You’d suspected, maybe, in some sort of flutter of wishful thinking, but never really allowed it to progress onwards to a hope, not when there was-- 

“But different,” Tatara adds, very clearly too, “doesn’t necessarily mean hierarchical.”

You don’t say anything for a moment but then you laugh, quiet; you can’t help yourself.

You want to tell him that it’s okay, that you never expected him to love you in order for you to love him, but then, you also never really expected to love him. You suppose that is how these things sort of happen, quiet and sneaky, warming you from within when you least expect them.

Mikoto ambles down the steps and looks at the two of you huddled over the bar counter around the new drink you’ve got Tatara trying out for you. He raises a brow, and it has got to be subconscious, because even if he feels the world is conspiring against him, you know that he would be the last person to actually take the time to address it out loud.

You set another of the same drink down in front of an empty seat and you tell him to try it, to tell you what he thinks.

He makes a noncommittal sound and plays with the beads of condensation on the glass as Tatara chatters on, shifting from topic to topic until you can almost forget the heat under your collar, the numbness in your fingertips.

Tatara takes his time with his drink but you take Mikoto’s glass when he's done, take the lazy arc that he drew on the glass with his finger, and you extend it until it comes full circle. 

 

*

 

It’s a rainy day when Tatara first kisses you, both of you coming back from a supermarket run. He apologises almost immediately after but doesn't look like he holds even a shred of regret. 

“You had raindrops in your lashes,” he laughs. “It was quite fetching and very hard to resist.”

You swear you have a clever retort in store somewhere except it’s not quite within your reach just this second, not with this gentle buzzing in your head, not unpleasant, not unwelcome. 

He laughs again, brighter, “And I've only wanted to do that forever.”

“You can do it again,” you tell him, and your own voice sounds distant and your heart sounds too loud, “if you want.”

“Yeah,” he says, bringing his smile to you. “Yeah, I do.”

 

*

 

It’s not long until you ask, “Have you said anything to him?” 

“No. He's--you know.” Tatara shrugs.

“Sulking constantly and steeping in self-loathing,” you say. “Yes, sadly, I do know.”

“I'd thought for most people it would be an ego boost, having two people hilariously in love with you and all, but then he's not most people.”

You look at him pointedly then. “I never said--”

“Oh _come on_ ,” Tatara laughs, like you are a complete idiot for thinking you ever needed to say anything, like it wasn't already written all over you and in your every line and arc of motion. 

“I thought we already established that he's not the only one I pay attention to,” Tatara says. “Mind you, he also undoubtedly reciprocates,” and he nods once, decisively, as if to say, _Trust me. I know these things._

You shake your head, “I know,” you say. “He'll never come out with it but I know.”

“We could stage an intervention,” he suggests. 

“Like what? Please don't scowl so hard or you'll give yourself a stress ulcer, Mikoto?”

“Yeah and cheer up! You have two fairly attractive--if I do say so myself--young bachelors available to you. Well semi-available as they are also available to each other--” and this makes you chuckle and want to kiss him, so you aim for his cheek because you still want to let him finish.

“But the endgame is that it's okay! We can all be hopeless losers together! There is nothing all that exciting about being hopeless on your own!"

“You’re ridiculous,” you tell him.

“It’s why you love me,” he beams.

“This is not untrue.”

 

*

 

The intervention is staged, on a Sunday afternoon, somewhere around breakfast for Mikoto and lunchtime for the rest of the world. 

Mikoto goes back to sleep, then hightails it out of the bar, and does not say a word to either of you for at least a good six hours. 

(”This is actually not that long considering he has gone days without stringing together more than a two-word sentence,” Tatara reminds you gently.)

Later that evening, Tatara idly wonders aloud, "Maybe he has decided we're out of our minds and his self-loathing has driven him into the arms of the blue king instead--” 

\--the exact moment Mikoto stumbles back into the bar and declares: “ _What_ the fuck.”

“Was that directed to the thing just now or the thing earlier?” you ask, holding back a laugh. You know, on a fundamental level, that you should not enjoy the suffering of your loved ones, but like, Tatara is half a second away from giggling and this is just. Too much.

His majesty crosses the room, makes a strangled sound in this throat, and faceplants into the couch.

“Do you think he'd react if we sat on him?” Tatara asks.

You make an attempt to look like you’re thinking it over and settle with, "Only one way to find out.”

And so you proceed to do so, and you’ve managed to discuss the new additions to the bar menu and Anna's upcoming shopping trip over the next fifteen or so minutes before you feel the couch move--or yourselves move.

“Okay,  _fine_ ,” he says.

“No,” Tatara says. “You need to say it properly.”

“Ugh,” Mikoto says.

“It's easy,” you say. “Repeat after me: I am not a waste of space and am deserving of love. Well--” you clarify, “being a waste of space does not preclude me from being deserving of love.”

“You’re _awful_ ,” Mikoto says, sourly, to no one and everyone, maybe to the universe, but he has now managed to rearrange his limbs, knocking both of you off-kilter and subsequently sprawling himself out in both of your adjacent laps.

“We love you too,” Tatara chirps, crossing his legs to make Mikoto as uncomfortable as possible, figuratively and literally, purely because he can, just as you run a hand through the chaos of red hair and sigh a little, at this, at them, and at your own overly full and pathetic heart.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this came out of eavesdropping on some talk about ~soulmates~ and i, uh, wanted to be a rebel. or something.


End file.
